Dell'Amico is an instructor of English literature and composition. In this essay, Dell'Amico explores how Lessing's reformist political convictions inform her play.

Doris Lessing declined to renew her membership in the Communist Party of Great Britain for the year 1957. Like so many other persons with communist political convictions in the West at this time, she felt that she had to cut off ties with the Soviet Union whose communist order had devolved into a pernicious dictatorship. Yet the reformist political convictions that led her to join the party in the first place never left her. Play with a Tiger is evidence of her continued concern with equality, for instance, as it is an examination of how marriage and gender norms contribute to women's lesser status in the Western world. Anna Freeman, the play's protagonist, would rather remain single, even if this means being lonely, as she believes...